


"Pale Iris"

by Pandora



Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Sacorria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 16:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9666593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: An unimportant young woman has a view from the sidelines of the alliance between the Galactic Empire and the Sacorrian Triad.





	

  1. “White”



 

Elvira was arrested for the second time a week after her twentieth birthday.  She was walking along her usual route on the village square footpath, and--of course-- she was wearing a white shirt.  It was a cloudwhite blouse with long-tongued white irises that her aunt had embroidered entirely by hand.  But she was still wearing a white shirt—and the color stood out with the glare of spilled milk.  Elvira had left school, without graduating, four years before, but she kept to the same assigned habits.  She wore little lace-knit white socks, and hidden underneath her indigo-dark blue workcloth skirt, she wore pristine white underpants.

She had borrowed that skirt from her younger sister Anniké--she would never have owned it herself, and she had hardly the daring to wear it.  Oh, she didn’t know how Rois Meek described a stormdark blue sky, with its pacing wind, in one of her better known poems.  She had never taken to reading, and even the most rebellious orange shirts at school hadn’t ever heard of Rois Meek.

No:  Elvira had always followed the rules precisely as they were given to her—and she did this with rigid thoughtless fear, and with _hope_.  It was the only chance she had to remain unnoticed.

She stood locked in place exactly where the intelligence officer had stopped her.  The nearby street was filled with the usual clutter of traffic—and while most of the people passing her kept their minds on their own concerns, some of them _looked_.  She blinked her eyes back and forth, but it wasn’t any use.  The rainfall of tears continued to slide down her face.  She gave a whispered sniffle, but the sound still snarled too loudly in her ears.

Junior Officer Progressina stood watching on with her arms crossed over her chest.  She snapped her tail with an irritated itch—and it was not just because Selonians do not cry in that fashion, and have never learned to understand it.

This young comradette was a tall well-shaped dust-corn blonde girl—and while she would have been short as a Selonian, she was taller than some of the human men Progressina knew—but she didn’t know how to use her height.  Her shoulders were laid down in a slump, and her mouth shivered as her face started to break underneath the onslaught of tears.

“Comradette!” she said, her voice a whipped out bark—and Elvira jerked up to attention.  She wiped at her nose with the side of her long ghost-white hand.  “This is not progressive behavior, and it is most certainly not helping your situation.  You should have outgrown _crying_ years ago.”

Elvira tried:  she cleared her throat, but her voice still had that tell-tale soggy quiver to it that she had never learned to hide.  “I’m sorry.”

“And I am glad to hear that.  But you need to--” And she turned around, along with Elvira, to see the official landcar with that distinctive Saygo engine whimper (and they both experienced that sudden, and inevitable urge, to buy one) that had heaved to a stop on the curb behind them.  The door swayed open, and after a reluctant pause, the officer stepped out.

The man walking towards them was noticeably shorter than Elvira.  He had his black boots polished into a sternly glaring mirror gloss, and he had black glareshade-glasses for eyes.  He had the hard focused stride of a senior officer, and each of his footsteps punched the ground.  He had stonedry white skin, and his colorless hair might have once been blond.  He turned his blank glasses on them, and Elvira felt her mouth wobble into a smile.

As he reached them, he spoke:  “Oh, we do live in the most progressive of societies when the only trouble we have to deal with on the street is the occasional rogue white shirt.  Don’t you agree?”

“Of course, comrade,” Progressina said.  “Well put.”

“I will handle this from here, Comradette Progressina.”  Then he turned on Elvira, and even when he tilted his head up to glare at her in the eye, she was the one who was awkward, as though her height was a burden she carried poorly.  Her doll-sized reflection cringed back inside the black eyes of his glareshades, but she knew better than to look away.

“Comradette,” he said.  “Well, well—it seems you have been keeping yourself occupied today by _wandering_ town at will.”

“I was walking home,” Elvira managed to say in a punched-out gasp.

The senior officer’s expression did not change, and Progressina said, her voice creeping into the opened silence:  “Comrade, I think she is telling us the truth.”

“You have a point.  White shirts don’t have the talent for lying.”  Then he charged ahead into his next question. “Then what were you doing _in town_.  Are you employed?”

Elvira opened her mouth—but though she knew she had to speak, and she could feel the correct words arranging into an answer, she had just enough dignity that she couldn’t stand to.  She had indeed had a job as the housecleaner at the village bakery—until the previous week, when she had arrived to see the droid The Owners had bought busy at her work.  She hadn’t found another position, and she had only just, that morning, gotten her final paycheque transfer.

“If you had a job, you would have told us by now.  You’re not that stupid.”  The senior officer clicked his teeth, but he seemed (and yes, she wasn’t imagining it) _pleased_.

“Perhaps we should handle the rest of this at the station,” Progressina said, her eyes snapping back and forth as she looked around them.

He continued as though he hadn’t heard her:  “So!  You were out today spending every last one of your remaining credits.”

Elvira shook her head, and blinked out freshly made tears.  Her eyes were raw and bruised-sore—and while she knew she should stop, she never could.  She could only loathe herself.  She had given every last cred in that cheque, as she had with the rest of her insufficient income from the bakery, to her parents to pay for her right to live with them, in the small back bedroom she spent most of her days trapped in, and that she shared with Anniké.  She didn’t have any money to spend.

She tried to speak, but the officer’s voice would not stop.  “How exactly are you planning to get by without an income, comradette? You should be out searching for a job _right now_.”

“I don’t know,” Elvira said, her voice drowned in tears.

“You don’t know!  Well, that is a very _progressive_ attitude.  I think I heard that one on a pronk song once.  It was called “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.”

“That sounds disgusting, comrade,” Progressina wisely decided to say.

“But we’re not here to chat,” and he paused again for the effect.  “Your identification card, _comradette_.  And I hope you haven’t gone and lost it in the fresher bowl.”

Elvira looked down as she took her ID out of her skirt pocket—and that was when she saw something that put an end to her crying.  The senior officer had an erection.  She wiped her hand across the blurred curtain of tears in her eyes, but she already believed what she had seen.

Progressina had noticed as well—she turned her face discreetly to the side, and spoke again:  “We really ought to get her back to the station.”

Elvira handed over the ID, and she looked straight at the senior officer as he snatched the card from between her fingers.  Previously, she had only known of this response that human men could not help but have from the whisper-giggled gossip she had overheard at school—but she knew the bulge in the senior officer’s trousers for what it was.  And she had to bite down into her lower lip to keep from falling into an actual tittered laugh.

The senior officer was glaring at the information on the ID.  “You’re _twenty_ years old.  I’m surprised even you didn’t try to wield that fact.”

He had never given her the opportunity, but she couldn’t tell him that.  Progressina took the card and read it with a glance.  “Comrade, I think we should let her go with a warning.”

“Yes, I think we can afford to be magnanimous with this one comradette,” he said—and permitted himself a plump smug sigh. He seemed even more pleased (and _excited_ ) now that he was conceding.  “I know where we can get the rest of our daily quota.”

He paused yet again before he gave the final word:  “Comradette _Elvira Corr_. You may consider yourself warned—and when I next see you, you had best be gainfully employed.”

Elvira knew what she had to say, even though she was already watching the slammed door of his back as he walked towards his waiting Saygo:  “Thank you, comrade.”

They were letting her go.  Elvira tucked her ID back into her pocket.  She had to sniffle down the last loose snot in her nose, but otherwise, she was recovered from her tears.  She turned back to the street—which would lead straight out of the village, and onto the dirt-track road in the midst of the crowded half-grown dust corn fields, where she would continue on for the four klicks to her family’s farmstead.  She had taken the first step when she heard Progressina speak behind her:

“Wait, comradette,” she said.  Elvira turned back before she could think why.  Progressina had her tail relaxed behind her, and her whiskers twitched in a wave.  “We should talk.  Don’t worry—it’s nothing to do with that business just now.  But there is something I can do for you.”

 

2.  “Yellow”

 

Several weeks later, Elvira was walking along the narrow path of an office floor corridor.  It was lined with clear picture windows—as though there was not one secret lurking away from view—that glowed with the burning corn-rose yellow sunlight outside.  She was accompanied by Nikola Grey Sandoval, the AARIS engineer’s _personal assistant_.  He had messy dark curls (what Anniké would have called “bedroom hair”) and pale golden-brown skin, and he wore a black velvet frockcoat with his iris purple shirt and wing-tipped dance shoes.  He moved with his hips forward in an easy, oblivious walk that had to be at least partly an act.

He had already stopped once to visit with the pair of comradettes from the third office in the row of blank beige book cover doors.  He had flirted.  He had arched his blackbird-winged eyebrows to go along with his point.  He had hahaed.  He had tossed his nightdark eyes.

Then when they had left, and  he had turned back towards her, his demeanor changed:  his mouth snapped back into place, and his eyes were glass-hard and indifferent again.

Since Elvira was nearly as tall as he was, she had to keep her shoulders hunched down in a slump, and she walked carefully to remain just slightly behind him.  But she did endeavor not to stare down at the floor ahead of them—she wanted to have that much dignity around him.

There was no one else about now, and Comrade Sandoval looked over at her.  She was still taken aback, with an firebug-electric jerk, when he actually spoke:  “So, Comradette Corr.  What do you make of DoTal thus far?”

Elvira’s eyelids shivered as she blinked back at him.  She hadn’t quite figured out how to look at him:  she had understood—almost as soon as she had begun to daydream about romantic scenarios—that she would never be able to marry.  Masculine beauty made her nervous.  She could smell his echo-faint cologne.  It was some sort of dark musky scent.

But she managed to speak:  “It’s a very progressive city.”

Comrade Sandoval grinned.  He was aware that she was a white shirt, but he must have still thought she was hiding a decidedly _unprogressive_ joke inside that sentence.  “Oh, it is that.”

When she turned her face towards the windows, she could see—beyond Cobble Stone Square below—a glimpse of the buildings of Dorthus Tal City, and a salt-glitter off in the background that she imagined must be the sea.  Thus far, she had only walked through the square, and she had not been able to stop long enough to see the blur of artworks at the booths.  But it was possible that she could:  and after she was paid, she could wander there knowing there were creds in her account.

One of the doors sighed opened ahead of them, and Klarina Bolt, the comradette who worked there, stepped out.  She had plain brown hair dumped loose around her shoulders and lace-coarse skin, and her mouth was dark with defiantly bright red lipstick to go with her honey-yellow blouse.  And she walked in the same fashion as the other workers:  as though she were going about an errand of the utmost progressive, Sacor-shaking importance.

Elvira stood by while she spoke with Comrade Sandoval.   She had to remind herself, as Klarina Bolt watched Comrade Sandoval talk with a drifting fond smile that seemed familiar, that she had her own position here, and therefore the same right to exist as she had.

She was the least intelligent of her mother’s children—and yet, somehow, she was the only one of them who would leave home.  Oh, it was true that her elder brother Crixen had finished that one term at the Saccorata Tech before he flunked out (and _purposefully_ —he had been an orange shirt), but now he was back at the farm for the rest of his life.  Anniké had taken to saying this was her “gap year” before university—but even she couldn’t actually believe that.

When Elvira told her mother about her new position, she was glad she had taken Anniké’s advice to remain silent until it was a done deal.  She had already obtained the permission that counted for the government, from their father, the day before.  But he did not count in their actual household, and she had to enter the dark cave of her mother’s room, where she was reading her ancestral copy of _The Book of Law_.  Elvira had never known her to acknowledge other books.

Her mother had taken a moment before she had spoken, and her voice had throbbed with her habitual smugly-hot fury:  _Good on you.  Now get out of my sight_.

Comrade Sandoval and Klarina Bolt were on the subject of sports—and in particular, some limmie match that had apparently been over years before. Elvira realized, and too late, that she was looking back down at the static-grey carpet, and her black silk shoes, again.  She forced the flower stalk of her neck up, and tried to look occupied with her own thoughts.

Comrade Sandoval’s voice had come to a halt, and Klarina Bolt  was looking over at her:  “What did you think, Comradette Corr?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Elvira said.

“You know,” Comrade Sandoval said.  “ _The_ goal, the one that must have only been Code:Red’s finest moment in an impressive career.  Everyone saw it happen.”

Then Elvira spoke the most shocking words he had ever heard—and which would ensure that afterwards, he would remember to see her:  “I don’t like limmie.”

She could still sense him sneaking glances at her as they entered their assigned door, the final one on the hallway—and into the rooms where Ceretha of R’vanye, one of AARIS’s finest (and most progressive) engineers, had hidden away to do her work; which—and the governmental orientation file Elvira had read was thoroughly clear on this—was of the _utmost secrecy_.

The front room would have originally been an open office space, but when Elvira had arrived, Ceretha had had it made over into a proper Drall library:  the windows were closed, so the only light came from the iris-glass lamps, and the walls were covered with shelves crowded with the jumbled puzzle of  Ceretha’s books.  She had brought nearly her whole collection from her flat in Saccorata.  The grey floor was covered with a rug with a sprawling dark flowered forest pattern, and Ceretha’s antique chrono sat hunched on display the corner bookshelf.  Its heartbeat ticking stalked through each minute and each hour.

Ceretha was in her place at her work-table, glaring at the computer screen.  Her thick-framed glasses glowed with its reflected white light.  Comrade Sandoval joined her for their consultation, while Elvira went into the kitchen alcove.

She set the antique copper-mirror kettle on to boil for Ceretha’s tea.  She preferred a hot black tea served in her artistic glass cups with a snowdust of sugar, and a scattering of the _top secret_ angleberries stashed inside the refrigeration-box arranged around it on the saucer.

While she worked, she could hear Ceretha’s voice in the main room:  “And it should have been the solution—but once again, it only led into another problem.”

Comrade Sandoval’s voice followed:  “That is not the news Their Leaderships want to hear from you.  I gathered that much from your last communication.”

“Oh, quite.”  She must have begun to tug on the ring she wore, with a large black star-armed gem, on her left hand.  It was only one of her nervous habits.  “But unfortunately that is the only news I have at present to give them.”

The orientation file had not revealed any details of The Project, which Ceretha had referred to aloud as the Starkiller—but then, that was information Elvira did not need to know.  But she did know that Ceretha spoke, at least once per day, with an Imperial engineer:  she had overheard the drone of his static-snarled voice, and once she had seen his small blue-lighted image standing on the table holopad during one of these conversations.

Ceretha had returned to examining her work when Elvira walked out carrying the tray balanced with the tea and a plate of the biscuits she had bought at the bakery downstairs.  “Thank you,” she said, to the computer screen, as Elvira set the tray down in its place.

She stepped back into the dustsoft shadows and watched as Ceretha ate through one of the biscuits in several thoughtless bites.  Ceretha may have been particular about her beverages, but she saw food merely as necessary fuel, and she was fine with whatever Elvira brought her.  And:  after the first few days of her position, Elvira had found that she took to having the run of the kitchen.  She had chosen these cream-stuffed pink biscuits in part for the color.

Ceretha sipped at her tea, and then took a wrinkled cigarra out of the table drawer.  She lit it with a tiny whipcracked spark and stared at Comrade Sandoval.  He had been working through a flimsy thin stack of documents, but he knew exactly when to look up.

Then she let loose a drag of smoke:  “It’s quite simple, comrade—but then it usually is.  I can see what I need to do.  But I haven’t yet come up with the actual way to accomplish it.”

Her voice was loose with thought through the veil of her breathed-out smoke.  “The Imperials shouldn’t have dropped this one on us.  They aren’t _that_ stupid—they knew that one little imperfection was there in the design, but they chose to overlook it.  Well, I learned a more _progressive_ approach.  We used to say of my one instructor at the tech that he experienced literal physical pain if he was around a machine that wasn’t functioning properly--”

She turned around in her chair, the cigarra dangling between her teeth, and her white glasses glared at Elvira.  “You! I haven’t consulted with you yet.  What do you think of all this?”

Elvira had stepped back before she could think better of it, and her hands felt like useless white doll-skin gloves at her sides.  “Um—even the smallest flaw is unacceptable.”

“Of course,” Comrade Sandoval said.

“ _Of course_ , indeed.  You have learned a few things here, Comradette Corr.   And now I must move to put an end to this one flaw, however insignificant it may look.”

Then:  she left her cigarra on the holopad edge while she sipped at her tea, and Comrade Sandoval turned back to his flimsies, and Elvira left them to it.  She walked back into the garishly lit kitchen and straightened up.  The building droid would manage the cleaning later.  Then she opened the refrigeration-box door, and took out the windowpane jar of plump golden angleberries.  She took one out, and crushed it into juice and seeds between her teeth.  It was not the first time she had dared to do so.  It wasn’t as though Ceretha got much out of them.

 

3.  “Orange”

 

It was on her fourth visit to the artists’ quarters in the square that Elvira noticed the painting.  She wondered if it had been there before:  she only knew that that day, it was displayed openly against the side of the booth just behind the northside fountain.  The artist was engaged in conversation with a tourist, so Elvira went over to examine it closer up.  It depicted a flower, a tall ghost-pale white iris growing from the empty floor of a fallow field.  The night sky overhead was filled with the white stabbed marks of stars.  There were really too many of them, but Elvira didn’t think that was a message about unity.  The painting did not seem to be telling her one thing.

And it was an actual painting—Elvira could make out the brush strokes on the solid door of canvas, and she thought she could smell the faint smell left of the thick oil paint.

The tourist’s shadow was walking away, and she took a step back from the white iris and the howling night sky in the painting to watch it from a more socially acceptable distance.  She had only ever seen holopictures made of static light and dust-motes before this—and she realized now there was a reason she hadn’t ever liked them:  they looked like the memories of pictures.  They looked like she could destroy them with her breath.

“Do you see something you like?” the artist’s voice suddenly said.  It took Elvira a minute to make out the words over the rushing creek sound from the fountain.

She was standing just behind the painting, but she looked directly at Elvira.  Several of the other artists were strange _beings_ Elvira had to believe now existed, but this offworld woman was human—she had grey-dulled brown hair done up in a swollen braid crown, and wore a sweeping flower-blotched skirt that bounced over her little feet.  She smiled, and her teeth were the yellow of overripe dustcorn.  Her mind might as well have been that strange sky in her painting.

Elvira shook her head, and then—since she had no reason to be irritated, and the woman  had to speak with her as part of her role:  “No.  I was just looking.”

“Look all you want,” the offworld woman said.

Elvira had seen Comrade Sandoval—he had appeared across the square in his dark iris petal velvet coat, the sunlight burning in his hair.  He hadn’t seen her.  He was with another one of his friends, a dust-blonde comradette from the right-side building.  Elvira hadn’t ever spoken with her, and Comrade Sandoval had not mentioned her by her name.  She looked back down at the painting.  It had been years since she had endured a drawing class at school, and she had never learned much about art.  “What—is the title on that one?”

“Oh, I don’t use titles for my work,” the woman said, her voice pushing through the fountain noise.  “Not even _Untitled_.  That stood out even on Aurea.  It’s for sale if that interests you.”

Elvira knew what she had to say—though she felt vaguely disappointed all the same.  The painting reminded her of the hole, the “dead” space, in her chest she had begun to think she had been born with.  “Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t afford it just now.”

“I can understand that,” the woman said.   “But if you like, I can put it on reserve for you until you have the credits.  Maybe you saw something there that you already knew.”

When she left the booth, Elvira had just transferred the creds for the down payment on the painting of the pale iris.  She didn’t feel anywhere near the guilt (or hear her mother’s snarled voice saying, deciding for her, _You don’t need something like that_ ) she had expected. 

She stood in front of the fountain, where she had the long view of the square: of the man spinning a cloud grey vase into being in front of a group of tourists, and the Saygos sauntering along the avenue, and the people who she did not know, and would never see again, moving about through the sugarsweet sunshine on their _progressively_ important, and urgent, errands.  The wind made her dark brown swing skirt rustle like the long-eared dustcorn leaves.

She hadn’t expected that she would see Comrade Sandoval again.  She never saw him when they were out of the rooms.   But only moments later, when she was walking along the seaside-path, she saw he was walking ahead of her with the blonde comradette:  she saw his distinctive coat, and the wind blew his voice back past her.  The blonde was nodding along with him.  Obviously, she had  taken the advice given in more than a few _Empress_ articles:  _Remember—let_ him _do the talking_!

Then she saw that he was holding her hand caught up in his, and _in public_.  Once, she would have wondered at why Comrade Sandoval fancied this comradette:  she was short with a plain white topato face, of average height, and forgettable weight.  She had a silk corn-rose tucked into her dull hair, but it only looked like a garish bruised wound.

But now she understood well enough—Comrade Sandoval didn’t mind at all that she wasn’t as pretty as he was.  He liked (even if he never consciously thought it) that about her.

Elvira had time to think as she walked.  She could do that, and none of the people around had any reason to tell:  her face looked blankly pleasant as the echo-voice in her mind floated from one thing to another.  She had even looked at the tall shadow of the Watchtower Base near the horizon, and wondered if any of the _subversive_ stories she wasn’t to know about it were true.  She thought on how she would use the credits in her first paycheque.  But then—even on this day, even with the fresh memory of the painting, she would think over to a bad memory.

There were far too many of those—though this one was the year she was thirteen, when the yard-teacher made her stand in the corner with her face to the wall.  It was her own fault—it was always her fault.  She had collapsed into sticky, pathetic, _weak_ tears in the first minute.  Then Iason, one of the orange shirts, told the others she had wet herself.

It might as well have happened only the other day—the fact that it was nearly seven years away in the past didn’t matter enough to help.  Elvira hurried her walk into a hard march.

She had slowed down when her new com buzzed into life with a grain-fly snarl, and the first ring leapt out.  She slapped at her skirt pocket—as this was only the second call she had received since she had activated it—before she grabbed it out of her purse and shook it.

Then she heard it:  the echoed-small com ring behind her.  She turned to see that Comrade Sandoval had his own little penknife-silver com out and snapped open.

She stared at the message written out silently on her com screen:  “AND I HAVE BECOME DEATH THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS.”

Elvira held the com locked inside her fisted fingers—she had never read those words before, and yet, she recognized them.  She had always known them.  They had always been there hidden away inside the secret she couldn’t quite see.

Comrade Sandoval had left his girl friend, and was walking towards her, his com hidden away inside his fisted hand.  When he joined her, he leaned in close to speak, so close she could feel the kissed warmth of his breath:  “I think we should get back to The Rooms.”

He snapped his fingers open, and clicked the image stalled on his screen into motion—it showed a lush greenlit moon floating underneath the side of a blood orange gas giant.  Then it showed a laser whip of lighting shooting out from an unknown source.  And a second later, that moon was blown apart, with a slow breath of fireworks, into a cloud of light.

 

4.  “Red”

 

The Death Star, the _Destroyer of Worlds_ , hovered in the night of space above Vagran.  It had already been waiting there when the _Arcadia_ pulled into orbit.  Elvira watched it through the viewing window in the guest parlour.  It was the size of a asteroid-moon, and it faded back into the darkness around it—until she noticed the numerous firebug lights from the windows.  Her ghosted reflection swayed along with her as she looked down at the sunlit world underneath it.  Vagran glowed inside the halo of its atmosphere with sapphire-wine oceans, and swirling dreamwhite clouds.  Elvira had not even had this view of Sacorria in the moments before the _Arcadia_ leapt into hyperspace:  this window had only faced the space in front of them.

(Oh, and then Comrade Sandoval had become spacesick, and she had looked at the wall and closed her eyes when he jumped up with a throaty couched retch.  A mouse droid had waited just behind his feet while he had finished vomiting.  But he had taken a bacta pill for that.)

Comrade Sandoval had returned to stand next to her, but he turned to speak to Lefftenant Thule, the officer who had been assigned to them.  She was a dark young woman with a constellation of blistered pimples on her chin—but she also wore several blood-ruby rank bars pinned to the bodice of her grimly proper grey uniform.  She never quite saw them when she had to speak, and he had only made that one attempt to flirt with her.

He kept his voice as distantly flat as he could:  “But why did she pick _Vagran_?”

Lefftenant Thule had been standing in a parade statue position, but now she shrugged.  Elvira noted that she spoke with a faded Curheg accent when she said:  “I heard the Admiral had a bad experience when she was on holiday there, and she’s still holding the grudge.”

“Oh, I see,” Comrade Sandoval said—he would wait to tell Elvira later on, when they were alone,  his opinion on that.  He had beautiful sun-blurred memories of the two weeks he had spent at an oceanside town there after he graduated university.

“It isn’t very _progressive_ of her,” Lefftenant Thule said, thoughtfully staring ahead.  “But this is what she wants, and the Grand Moff can afford to give her the favor.  They have just dealt those Rebels the death blow—and they have Their Leaderships to thank for it.”

She looked back at the room, and at them, before she continued:  “Anyhow, there won’t be any need to blast the rock to pieces—the grannos gave way at the first communication.  I believe I told you both that was how it would happen.  We should make the landing soon.  I have heard that this bay near the spaceport is especially pretty.  Well.  I suppose we’ll all find out for ourselves.”

Comrade Sandoval was looking forward to living on Vagran.  He had already processed the filework for his mother, and two school-aged orange shirt sisters, to join him.  As for Elvira, she hadn’t so much as commed her family with a short note.  Oh, she had thought of her sister and brother—but she could not risk helping them.  They would tell her mother, and she would know the exact words to convince them to bring her with them.  But she hadn’t told Comrade Sandoval about her family, and he hadn’t known to ask.  That meant she didn’t have to lie to him.

Elvira had never so much as imagined living on another planet before.  She had learned when she was still a child that it was best not to imagine, or want, anything.

This wasn’t how she would have wanted it to go:  Ceretha of R’Vanye had committed suicide (or she had taken tea poisoned with the purple dust from a Sacorrian Iris, and they were supposed _to think she had_ ) only the day after the Death Star destroyed the moon with the rebel base.   Her two nieces had descended from Saccorata to fight over her library, and Elvira had taken the chance she had with Comrade Sandoval—he had returned to his governmental department, and she went with him.

“Yes, we don’t have any cause to complain,” she said, staring Lefftenent Thule directly in the eye.   Then she smiled.  “We have been quite lucky.”

She turned  back to the scene outside the window.  She thought of the room she would live in at the dreamed image she had of the town by the sprawling skygrey bay.  She would hang the painting of the ghost-iris on the wall where no one else would have to see it.  It was lying where she had hidden it at the bottom of her luggage, and it was one of the few things she had from her life thus far.  It is (of _course_ ) the progressive thing to look away from the past, and towards the future.

Comrade Sandoval reached his hand out, and she took it in her own, and tangled her fingers together with his.  Yana, his girl friend, had chosen to remain on Sacorria—and she could see, logically, that she was his preferred type.  Elvira had always known she would die alone.  And now, and soon, she would finally learn the mysteries of a man’s body.  Anything was possible at this point.

 

*

**Author's Note:**

> *This story was written for the Fanon AU Challenge at A Certain Star Wars Message Board, and makes considerable use of Ewok_Poet's fanon for the Legends world Saccoria--the character Code:Red, the Star Destroyer _Arcadia_ , and _Empress_ (think _Cosmopolitan_ in Space) are her creations.
> 
> *The version posted there has been edited slightly in order to be sufficiently "friendly" for their TOS. This is the original, unedited, story.


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